Posts tagged with: Defending the Free Market

A couple of interviews to bring you up to speed on from that last couple of days:

First of all, here’s Acton Director of Research Samuel Gregg on the GRN Alive morning show on the Guadalupe Radio Network this morning to discuss current efforts to raise the federal minimum wage, giving his analysis on the likely impact of such a move on the economy and the job market.

And from yesterday, here’s Acton co-founder and President Rev. Robert A. Sirico with host Mike Rosen on The Mike Rosen Show on 850 KOA in Denver, Colorado, to discuss Pope Francis’ recent comments to United Nations officials, which included remarks on “legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the State.” Rosen and Sirico speak extensively about Catholic teaching on economics, and about the misleading nature of the term “trickle-down economics.”

I am not an economist. Truth be told, I only took one class in economics as an undergrad. However, I’ve learned a lot in the past few years, and one of the things I’ve learned is that most people don’t understand economics.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry knows this as well, and explains it far better than I could. In today’s Forbes, Gobry breaks down the understanding of economics into two broad camps: the “productivist” view and the “creativist.” First, the productivist:

Violently compressed, the productivist view of the economy holds that an economy works because it gives people stuff to do and stuff to buy. The reason why an economy which hums along hums along is because it produces enough stuff and people have enough money to buy that stuff so that people buy stuff and that gives jobs to the people who produce stuff, and in turn the stuff that is produced makes people want to buy them. To the productivists, the key thing is to keep the machine running and, hopefully, make it run faster, and more efficiently. But, fundamentally, what makes the economy run is this consumerist dynamic.

This, Gobry says, is the way most people – even economists – understand economics. It’s right in the short-term, but flawed. This viewpoint holds that economics is merely an endless cycle of buying and selling. As long as there is products are made, bought and sold, everything should be okay. (more…)

Acton’s busy week of media appearances continued last night with Acton President Rev. Robert A. Sirico joining guest host Arthur C. Brooks – president of the American Enterprise Institute – on The Hugh Hewitt Showto discuss Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, and the compatibility of Catholic social teaching with free market capitalism. We’ve embedded the interview for you below, and added the video of Arthur Brooks’ 2012 Acton University plenary address after the jump.

Television evangelist Pat Robertson is certainly known for saying provocative things, and he’s done it again.

When Robertson’s co-host, Wendy Griffith, said not all families could afford to have multiple children, Robertson replied, ‘That’s the big problem, especially in Appalachia. They don’t know about birth control. They just keep having babies.’

‘You see a string of all these little ragamuffins, and not enough food to eat and so on,’ he said, and it’s desperate poverty.’

“Vanish the Night,” a new single by UK band, Ooberfuse begins with Shin Dong-hyuk, the survivor of a North Korean death camp, saying, “Don’t forget us.” The band released the song to coincide with North Korea Freedom Week (April 28-May 4) and to draw attention to the atrocities happening in North Korea. You can watch the video below:

Cherrie Anderson, the lead singer of Ooberfuse, says this about the song:

We have joined forces with Shin Dong-hyuk…His account of the routine violence and brutality inside Camp 14 ignited our desire to respond somehow. Vanish the Night calls for the lights to be turned on in what has been described as one of the darkest places on earth. Our song is a message of hope for the ordinary people of North Korea whose suffering often goes unnoticed and whose cries are largely unheard.

Shin Dong-hyuk was born in a North Korean death camp and is the only known escapee. When he was just 13 years old he overheard his mother and brother planning to break out so he told the guards and then he was forced to watch as they were executed. Several years later, he met a man named Park, a political prisoner. Park spoke of the the world outside the camp and outside North Korea; he gave Dong-hyuk a desire to live outside the horrors of his country. The pair decided to attempt an escape. Park died trying to climb the electric fence, but Dong-hyuk got out, posed as a North Korean soldier, and made his way out of the country. You can read his full story here. Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) also describes the horrors happening in Dong-hyuk’s former home: (more…)

Over at Fieldnotes Magazine, Matthew Kaemingk offers a good reminder that in our social solutions-seeking we needn’t be limited to thinking only in terms of market and state. By boxing ourselves in as such, Kaemingk argues, Christians risk an overly simplistic, non-Biblical view of human needs and human destiny:

When presented with almost any social problem (education, health care, poverty, family life, and so on), today’s leaders typically point to one of two possible solutions—a freer market or a stronger state. But in opposition to these rather myopic solutions, I think there is a more complex and biblical lens through which leaders can consider the social eco-system and the people who move around in it.

Instead of simplistic descriptions of human beings as either clients of the state or competitors in the market, the Christian Scriptures present humanity in a refreshingly complex way. We find a complex creature with a wide variety of gifts, abilities, interests, aspects, loyalties, and solidarities. Created in the image of God, human beings in the Bible are anything but simple. They are musical, communal, religious, artistic, familial, charitable, scientific, literary, moral, athletic, fun, and funny. The robust anthropology found in the Bible depicts a creature that could never be fully defined, controlled, content, or nourished by the market or the state alone—thank God.

This perspective ties in well with Rev. Robert Sirico’s final chapter in his book, Defending the Free Market, where he criticizes the popular notion of homo economicus, from which plenty of bad economic policy and market decision-making has been generated:

Any man who was only economic man would be a lost soul. And any civilization that produced only homines economici to fill its markets, courts, legislative bodies, and other institutions would soon enough be a lost civilization. Familial love, voluntary dedication to philanthropy and faith, the creation of art and music would be at their most minimal level, and whole sectors of life would completely vanish. Focusing the whole of life on the acquisition of quantifiable goods does not bring true happiness or peace, as almost everyone knows. We all have material appetites, but we do not (pray God) always feed them…Human beings find ultimate fulfillment not in acquisition but in developing, sharing, and using their God-given creative capacities for good and giving themselves to others. (more…)

I rather like Serene Jones’ piece in Huffington Post, “Economists and Innkeepers.” Jones got some things right. She knows that Christian Scripture teaches many economic lessons, like subsidiarity and stewardship (although she doesn’t use those terms.) She says, “Economic theory is replete with theological and moral assumptions about human nature and society” and that is correct. As Istituto Acton’s Kishore Jayabalan reminds us,

Things like the rule of law, a tradition of equality for the law, which should cut down on corruption, which give people the confidence and security in the future to take some risks and to develop the goods that they have either personally or socially, and use them for the good of all.

We make economic, legal and moral decisions that affect others every day, in ways large and small. Jones is practically defining subsidiarity when she says, “I would argue that rather than being merely faceless economic units, we all have a moral responsibility for the care of each other.” (more…)